Friday, July 4, 2008
at
7:00 AM

Posted by Daniel Ratner, Mechanical Engineer

One of the things I look forward to every summer is the Tour de France. I'm always fascinated when I hear about the hairpin turns and steep climbs. To bring the Tour de France to life and help you experience it stage by stage, we're very excited to provide Street View for the 2008 Tour de France route.

With this launch, you can now follow the race through each of the 21 stages with just a click of a mouse and enjoy a perspective similar to what your favorite cyclists see as they wind through France's majestic mountains, vivacious cities, and tranquil countryside. To jump right in and see panoramic imagery at street level for the Tour de France, navigate over to google.com/tourdefrance2008. Or keep reading and I'll take you on a little tour of the Tour route!

The Tour de France route marks our first launch of Street View imagery in Europe, and we're bringing with us some of our newly released features such as ground-filling and face blurring, but we're also introducing some more new features.

First off, we're now featuring even higher quality imagery -- take a look for yourself:

View Larger MapColiseum in Nimes, found within Stage 14 from Nimes to Digne-Les-Baines

View Larger MapNearing the finish line in L'Alpe-d'Huez, found in Stage 17 from Embrun to L'Alpe-d'Huez, arguably the most physically demanding stage of the whole race

View Larger MapThe Eiffel Tower and Seine river in Paris, passed in Stage 21 from Etampes to Paris' Champs-Elysees, the final stage of the race

We've also been keeping busy since first announcing our the state-of-the-art face detection technology -- you'll see our new license plate blurring technology as you travel through the Tour de France route.

View Larger MapThis feature, seen on a car in the town of Pipriac within Stage 3 from Saint-Malo to Nantes, complements our previously launched face blurring feature

Of course, there's only one way to conclude a blog post about the Tour de France -- with an image of the finish line!

View Larger MapThe Arc de Triomphe, at the western end of the Champs Elysee. If you zoom in, you can look at the detailed sculputres on the frieze